Sometimes it’s really hard to wrap my head around far Apple has come in recent years – from near bankruptcy and almost total irrelevence, to a point where their new product launches feel like rock concerts, and one sees almost daily stories about different industries they are set to either take over or destroy en route to extraordinary profits. Amazing.

If you missed the news somehow, one of Apple’s most recent announcements involves a video rental service, with a few interesting twists – with the Apple TV set-top box videos can be ordered through the TV with a remote control, each of the major studios have offered up movies for the service, it sounds like newly-released DVDs will be available within 30 days, once you start the movie you have 24 hours to finish it before it “disappears”, you can move the movie across multiple devices, a hologram of Steve Jobs will sit beside you while you watch the movie… in other words, a pretty comprehensive offering. To quote Jobs:

“I think we got it all together”

Indeed – and that’s what continues to amaze about Apple’s offerings (noting that I made up the hologram, part of course). It’s not so much the technological wizardry embedded in them, though there is plenty of that in the “background”, but this relentless focus on delivering complete consumer experiences. By no means does this mean Apple is perfect, as among other things they have a “walled garden” tendency that continues to pop up at inopportune times (even while they are credited with knocking down walls in other industries). But they are doing some amazing things for customers in many industries that have for too long been satisfied with the status quo, and I applaud them for it.

So great, in fact, that one of the more common questions I see bouncing around is whether Apple TV will kill cable TV, as the Pajama Entrepeneur (not to be confused with the Tuxedo Contractor) articulates here. My response would be… probably not. The change that will come to television, like the change that comes to most industries, will likely continue to be relatively slow, and what the cable companies and others have to do is respond to such developments with offerings of their own.

On this point, think about what we’ve already seen happen in the music industry – iTunes launched, became extremely popular, and the music companies got very antsy about the balance of power in the buyer/supplier relationships, just as classic business strategy dictates they should (yes, I’m purposely ignoring all other aspects of the digital music development at this time). Is it concievable that studios would repeat the same tactic in the movie business and have a single buyer dominate the relationship?

I doubt it, and I’m quite sure the cable companies themselves can and will do some very, very interesting things here, while leveraging some very strong competitive advantages of their own. It’s not like they’re sitting on their hands waiting to be knocked off their perch, so stay tuned because this battle is just starting to heat up…